Saturday, March 5, 2011

Gravity's bias for left may be writ in the sky: The pair calculate that if gravity depended on just left or right-handed gravitons, that would have skewed the polarisation pattern in an obvious way. What's more, inflation would have stretched these effects to astronomical proportions, making them easily visible to astronomers...
Evidence of left-handed gravitons in the CMB would be "a triple discovery", says Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, who has worked with Magueijo and Benincasa on the subject. "It would confirm inflation, that gravity is quantum mechanical and that there is left-right asymmetry in quantum gravity."